EXHIBITIONS

In chronological order of opening date, newest first

[Posted 03.xi.2018]

Bohemian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement and Oscar Wilde’s Newport

24th March 2018 – 4th November 2018

‘Bohemian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement and Oscar Wilde’s Newport celebrates the ideas embodied by the artists, poets and thinkers popular during the Aesthetic Movement (1870-1890), an important era of artistic experimentation here and abroad. The exhibition will feature a selection of furniture, ceramics, wallpaper, glass, silver, paintings and costume illuminating the tenets of this “art for art’s sake” movement personified by its most influential impresario Oscar Wilde.’

Victorian Passions

An hommage to Mark Samuels Lasner

Partially blind since birth, Mark Samuels Lasner proves that having and realizing a vision does not require eyesight; instead, it takes imagination, knowledge, a will of iron, and a brilliant mind. After being orphaned at age eleven, he spent his adolescence in Connecticut with his grandmother. Among her friends was May Bradshaw Hays, daughter of Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916), the Jewish folklorist and compiler of fairy tales who had lived for decades in England. Hays introduced Samuels Lasner to the world of Victorian writers and artists, some of whom she had met as a child, and gave him a tea set that was a wedding present to her parents from William Morris (1834–1896), the poet and Arts-and-Crafts designer. With that, Samuels Lasner began collecting the Pre-Raphaelites. Later, he was drawn to the Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s. Eventually, he assembled a collection covering a wide range of intellectual and artistic movements from the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. This exhibition celebrates his extraordinary collection, which he has donated to the University of Delaware Library, by displaying a few highlights from the more than 9,500 items. Each object tells a story about the passionate emotions of its creator. But the greatest passion on view is that of Mark Samuels Lasner himself, whose love for the Victorians unites everything here.

Curated by Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, Department of Women and Gender Studies. For more information, clickhere. To listen to Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner talking about the exhibition, clickhere.

[Posted 15.iv.2017]

Malta is not the first place one associates with Wilde, so it is extra interesting to find that it is the home of a significant collection, now on view to the public. This has been organised by The Storm Petrel Foundation to inaugurate the opening of The Storm Petrel Foundation exhibition house at 79 Triq San Anton, Attard, a renovated traditional, Maltese Townhouse, with the private collection of company director Francis Spiteri Paris, entitled “Vanities”. The title holds true the meaning of each historical artefact, book, letter and lithograph displayed in these splendid surroundings that could transport the onlooker back to the fashionable age of late Victorian England.

Viewing of the exhibition is currently open to the public until May 2017.

An Exhibition by Patrick Chambon of a selection of the original drawings for his book Oscar Wilde FabulLeux published by Hazan, will take place at the Galerie de L’Angle, 45 rue des Tournelles, 75003 Paris. The private view is on Wednesday 19th April 2017, 18h00 to 21h00.

An exhibition at the Liverpool Central Library, William Brown Street, Liverpool

5th August–31st October 2016

Admission is free

Liverpool Central Library commemorates the 150th anniversary of the birth in Liverpool of Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947)—poet, critic, and novelist—with an exhibition in its Hornby Library. On display are over 50 rare or unique items, many highlighting his lifelong connections to Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Original photographs, drawings, manuscripts, unpublished letters, Victorian periodicals, and first editions tell the story of Le Gallienne’s successful literary career, which took him from Liverpool to London, the US, and France. Drawn from public and private collections and local institutions (including family papers in the Liverpool Record Office of Liverpool Central Library), these materials show his importance to the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, his involvement with the Yellow Book, his intimate ties to late-Victorian feminists known as “New Women,” and his links to artists such as Max Beerbohm and Walter Sickert.

Most of all, this exhibition illuminates the role that Oscar Wilde played as his idol, mentor, and friend—a relationship that began when 17-year-old Dick Gallienne, clerk in a Liverpool office, heard Wilde lecture in 1883 at the Claughton Music Hall in Birkenhead. Inspired by Wilde’s personal style and ideas about art, he renamed himself “Richard Le Gallienne,” wore long hair and artistic clothes, and dedicated himself to becoming an equally flamboyant figure and unconventional writer, devoted to Beauty in all its forms.

Programming in conjunction with the exhibition: “Late-Victorian Literary Liverpool: A Symposium”. Saturday, 29 October 2016, Liverpool Central Library will bring together scholars and collectors from the UK and the US for a one-day symposium about Liverpool as a literary and cultural center at the end of the 19th century. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Curators of “Richard Le Gallienne: Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet”:

Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, USA. A collector of work by late-Victorian writers and artists, he is also a bibliographer and author of The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (1998), The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (2008), and other books.

Margaret D. Stetz, Ph.D, is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA. She is author of over 100 published essays, many of them on Wilde and his times—e. g., “Oscar Wilde and the New Woman” in Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013)—and of books such as British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 (2001) and Facing the Late Victorians (2007). With Mark Samuels Lasner, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Gender and the London Theatre (Bryn Mawr College Library, 2003) and “Everything Is Going on Brilliantly”: Oscar Wilde and Philadelphia (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 2015).

For the Press Release, please click here. For a flyer, please click here.

Something Sensational to Read in the Train: Magdalen’s New Oscar Wilde Collection

Curated by Christine Ferdinand and Sophie Duncan, photography by Laura Ashby. Selected items from the Magdalen College Library and Archives.

The Old Library, Magdalen College, Oxford, Summer and Autumn 2016. For our review by Pia de Richemont, please click here.

The Nightingale and the Rose

— Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 21st June to 11th September 2016